Performing Gender at the Beginning

of Modern Chinese Theatre

Siyuan Liu

The modern Chinese genre huaju (spoken drama) marked its centenary in 2007. An imported
form, huaju is different from traditional Chinese theatre in a number of ways, including its use
of gender-appropriate casting rather than female impersonation. However, while actresses
started playing female characters in the mid 1910s, gender-appropriate casting only became a
standard practice in the 1920s, when modern “scientific” discourse that emphasized the marked
differences between the biological sexes made cross-gender casting seem an unreasonable choice
in huaju.1 Throughout the first decade of huaju (1907–late 1910s), which is generally referred to

1. In Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early
Republican Period, Frank Dikötter argues: “With the rise of medical science, differentiation between other groups
of people also became more important: through an investigation of their sexuality, people were more rigidly
classified according to their gender, age and social position” (1995:9).

Siyuan Liu is a Franklin Fellow and visiting Assistant Professor of theatre at the University of Georgia.
He received his PhD in theatre and performance studies from the University of Pittsburgh and has
published several research articles on modern Chinese and Japanese theatre in Theatre Journal, Asian
Theatre Journal, and Text & Presentation.

TDR: The Drama Review 53:2 (T202) Summer 2009. ©2009

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 35
 as wenmingxi (civilized drama) or xinju (new drama), female roles were generally performed
by actors rather than actresses.2 This was the case with the first huaju production, the 1907
adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin entitled Heinu yutian
lu (Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven). This production was staged in Tokyo by the all-male student
group Chunliu She (the Spring Willow Society), comprising Chinese students studying in
Japan.3 The practice of all-male casting continued when the students returned to Shanghai,
where wenmingxi flourished in the 1910s. Although challenged by the emergence of actresses,
first in 1912 in all-female troupes and two years later in 1914 in mixed-sex companies, the
practice of female impersonation continued to dominate the wenmingxi stage and was still
considered the best performance of femininity throughout the 1910s.
If the new, imported spoken drama was supposed to break from traditional Chinese theatre
such as jingju (Beijing opera) and follow the conventions of Western dramas and theatrical
productions, how can we understand the persistence of female impersonation in the first decade
of huaju? Two scholars in the past decade have attempted to tackle this issue as part of their
broader studies of Chinese theatre. They offer two perspectives on wenmingxi’s performance
of gender: as an appropriation of traditional theatrical conventions in the anti-authoritarian and
radical spirit of modernity; and as a mode of performing gender drag that followed Western
realism without the benefit of traditional theatrical conventions (Chou 1997:141–50; Lei
2006:101–07).
Unfortunately, this dualistic view of female impersonation in wenmingxi as either modern
or traditional is historically inaccurate since it overlooks the fact that wenmingxi’s immediate
predecessor in cross-gender performance was neither Chinese jingju nor Western realism, but
the onnagata (male actors in female roles) of Japan’s first modern theatre, shinpa (new school
drama).4 Shinpa started in Japan in the 1880s as a modern reaction to kabuki and reached the
height of its popularity in the first decade of the 20th century, when the Spring Willow Society
was formed in Tokyo. Like wenmingxi that followed it, shinpa combined elements of Western
spoken drama such as colloquial speech and modern staging techniques, with certain conven-
tions of traditional theatre, including female impersonation. By the time the Spring Willow
Society staged Heinu yutian lu in 1907, shinpa had been in existence for two decades and had
established its own conventions for performing Japanese femininity. Shinpa onnagata were also

Figure 1. (previous page) Kawakami Sadayakko as Tosca with Matsumoto Kōshirō VII as Scarpia in a
1913 production of La Tosca at Tokyo’s Imperial Theatre. (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre
Museum, Waseda University)

2. Apart from casting female impersonators, wenmingxi was different from later huaju in several other ways, includ-
ing the use of scenarios and improvisation instead of written scripts, the occasional inclusion of music and songs,
and the appropriation of certain stylized acting conventions from jingju (Beijing opera).
3. In this essay, I use both “Spring Willow Society” (Chunliu She) and “Spring Willow Theatre” (Chunliu Juchang).
The former term refers to the group of Chinese student actors in Tokyo. The latter is the name of the company
established by the same group in Shanghai in the 1910s. At times, I use “Spring Willow” to highlight the consis-
tency of their performance style from Tokyo to Shanghai.
4. In their studies on this subject, Chou Huiling and Daphne Lei do mention the connection between wenmingxi
and modern Japanese theatre, but both seem unaware of the shinpa onnagata. Chou mistakenly attributes the
Japanese influence to a different and later modern theatrical form, shingeki (new drama; 1997:141, 143). In reality,
shingeki emerged around the same time as the Spring Willow Society and followed Western theatrical conventions
much more closely than shinpa, including gender-appropriate casting. Similarly, although Lei correctly identifies
shinpa as an important source for wenmingxi, she seems unaware of the presence of the onnagata in shinpa, since
Siyuan Liu

she considers “the reintroduction of actresses” as part of shinpa’s “Western-inspired experimentation,” along with
the “use of Western-style staging and everyday speech, adaptation of Western plays, and so forth” (2006:102).

36
beginning to establish conventions of performing Western female identity, following the
example set by shinpa’s only female star Kawakami Sadayakko, who had seen Sarah Bernhardt,
Ellen Terry, and other top European actresses during her theatrical tours to the US and Europe
with her husband Kawakami Otojirõ and his Company. It was in reality this shinpa model of
female impersonation—a combination of kabuki and European melodramatic conventions, a
liminal form between tradition and modernity, East and West—that was the direct precedent
of cross-gender casting in wenmingxi.
There is a clear link between shinpa and gender performance in kabuki. Shinpa’s impact on
Spring Willow’s productions in Tokyo and Shanghai and, via Spring Willow, on gender perfor-
mance in wenmingxi, is part of the “sedimentation” or “materialization” of modern, European-
oriented sexuality in China. It is only through this broader socio-historical context that we can
truly understand the performance of femininity in early modern Western-style theatre in China.

Shinpa: Spring Willow’s Model for Gender Performance

Shinpa originated in Japan in the 1880s from two sources. The first was the so-called sõshi
shibai (rough young men’s theatre) that arose in Osaka out of post–Meiji Restoration discontent
among a group of young men who used theatre to promote their ideas of social and political
reform. Its most famous representative, Kawakami Otojirõ, brought the form from Osaka
to Tokyo and national prominence in 1893. Between 1899 and 1902, Kawakami Otojirõ
and Sadayakko together toured the US and Europe twice, performing kabuki-style plays and
observing, among other things, mainstream Western theatre’s performance of womanhood.
Upon returning to Japan, they set out to reform Japanese theatre, calling their brand of
shinpa seigeki, a direct translation of the Western “straight theatre.” As Ayako Kano points
out, although they aimed to “straighten” Japanese theatre by eliminating such conventions
as singing, dancing, and cross-gender representation—which they deemed incompatible with
modern, “direct” theatre (Kano 2001:57–84)—they were only partially successful, especially
in the realm of gender performance. The couple did succeed in introducing Sadayakko as
the first (and only) female shinpa star by billing her, in the newspaper Yomiuri shinbun on
28 Janu-ary 1903, as knowledgeable of and experienced in the performance of female roles
in the West (reprinted in Shirakawa 1985:374). It was her performance of Desdemona in a
localized production of Othello in 1903 that set her on the path to stardom,5 and she continued
with other heroines favored by Bernhardt and Terry in such plays as Hamlet, The Merchant of
Venice (both in 1903), and other European dramatic and melodramatic classics. Since Sadayakko
introduced these European plays to Japanese audiences, her style had a great influence on
shinpa’s performance of Western womanhood.
However, Sadayakko’s popularity failed to undermine the legitimacy of shinpa onnagata,
even in the realm of performing Western womanhood. In fact, she often shared the spotlight
with shinpa onnagata, who undoubtedly benefited from her direct experience with Western
melodramatic conventions which, as Michael Booth points out, were just as stylized as the
techniques of the onnagata: “Gesture, facial expression, speech, and movement were strongly
emphasized within set acting patterns” (1965:190) and strict conventions governed “the
Performing Gender in Chinese Theatre

specialized acting necessary for the portrayal of the stock character types” for both men and
women (198). As can been seen in a picture of Sadayakko in a 1913 production of La Tosca
(fig. 1), the actress was clearly utilizing melodramatic gestures and postures. Shinpa onnagata
borrowed Sadayakko’s techniques and blended them with their kabuki-based conventions to
create their own performance of Western womanhood.

5. Desdemona was also the role played by the first professional actresses on the English stage in 1660. It was seen as
“a part well suited to an alluring emphasis on an actress’s femininity: she is gentle, passive and vulnerable, she is
suspected of being a whore and she is ultimately the victim of horrific bedroom violence” (Howe 1992:39).

37
 While Kawakami’s branch of shinpa
grew out of political activism and was
considered artistically crude, the other
impetus behind the birth of shinpa was
the growing frustration among politicians,
intellectuals, and amateur actors with
kabuki’s inability to depict life realistically.
The first presentation of this style of
shinpa, the 1891 performance of a group
of actors called Saibikan, featured a dance
by the actress Chitose Beiha sandwiched
between two plays. Saibikan disbanded
after this one show, and almost all
subsequent productions in this style by
shinpa groups other than Kawakami’s
featured actors performing female roles
in a reformed version of the traditional
kabuki onnagata’s style.
As kabuki scholars have pointed
out,6 kabuki onnagatas perform what is
considered the paragon of womanhood.
This role is not based on real women but
on the wakashu, the junior partner in a
homosexual relationship between two
samurais that is traditionally initiated as
an apprenticeship and rite of passage.
Early kabuki onnagata in the late 17th
Figure 2. Takada Minoru (left) and Kawai Takeo. (From Engei
and early 18th centuries were former
Gaho 1910).
wakashu kabuki players, and the manuals
of the onnagata’s art emphasized achieving
the qualities of ideal womanhood through meticulous gender training both on- and offstage.7
Applying gender theory to onnagata analysis, Maki Morinaga points out that this practice
underscores the following principles: “(1) gender identity can be divorced from sex identity, (2)
the gender dichotomy is actually based on the gender spectrum, and (3) gender is presentation
and not representation” (2002:263).
Early shinpa onnagata directly inherited the premodern kabuki tradition of presenting
gender as cited conventions. One of the first generation of shinpa actors, Yamaguchi Sadao,
was trained as a kabuki onnagata (Toita 1956:268), and Kawai Takeo, often considered the best
shinpa onnagata, was the son of a kabuki actor. Critics hailed his style as “brilliant and florid,”
reminiscent “no doubt of his Kabuki origins” (272). Stage shots of Kawai in kimono roles reveal
him as indeed using some kabuki onnagata conventions with a slightly realistic and contempo-
rary twist. One such example is a picture of him standing in front of Takada Minoru, a leading
shinpa star specializing in tough men roles (fig. 2). As Katherine Mezur notes, the convention
of the onnagata standing posture is well established:
The onnagata keeps his knees slightly bent and turned inward. With one knee slightly
behind the other, he presses one knee into the back of the other knee. In standing

6. Maki Morinaga (2002) and Katherine Mezur (2005) have provided some detailed discussion on this topic.
7. Among these manuals are those written by the first generation of kabuki onnagata, such as Ayamegusa (The Words
Siyuan Liu

of Ayame) by Yoshizawa Ayame I (1673–1729) and Onnagata hiden (Onnagata Esoterica) by Segawa Kikunojō I
(1693–1749).

38
 postures, the onnagata twists his upper torso opposite to the knee angle, creating a twist
up through the spine, which complements the front wrap line of the kimono. This basic
posture makes the onnagata appear small. Further, it lowers the koshi (pelvic region), the
center of gravity. (2005:184)

When we compare the description of the kabuki onnagata standing posture with this picture,
it becomes obvious that Kawai’s appeal indeed lay in his kabuki roots. As a tall man, he stands
in front of the male lead, striking a kabuki-like pose with his feet, knees, and torso following
the kabuki convention, enhanced by his left hand lifting the kimono and right hand holding a
handkerchief, thus appearing smaller and more “feminine” than the man standing behind him.
What he has done here is to adapt these techniques—with the help of more realistic scripts and
mise-en-scène—to portray contemporary middle-class women who were the anchors of shinpa’s
domestic melodramas.
In the early 1900s, shinpa onnagata, like Kawai, benefited from Sadayakko’s melodramatic
style and added it to their shinpa-based repertoire to perform Western femininity, sometimes
even acting in the same play with her. Sadayakko and Kawai appeared side by side in two French
plays, Pour la couronne (For the Crown; 1905) by François Coppée and Patrie (The Fatherland;
1906) by Victorien Sardou (Matsumoto 1980:381, 385). In both productions, Kawai played
aristocratic women while Sadayakko played young girls.8 Of the two, Patrie was a semihistorical
melodrama concerning
a suppressed Flemish
rebellion against Spanish
occupiers in the 16th
century. Sardou, the
playwright, recommended
his play to Kawakami
during the latter’s second
tour in Paris in 1901
(Fuller [1913] 1977:217–
20). The shinpa version
of Patrie was staged in
October 1906 with
Kawakami as Count de
Rysoor, the leader of
Flemish rebels; Sadayakko
as Rafaela, the compas-
sionate and moribund
Figure 3. Kawai Takeo as Tosca with Fukasawa Kōzō as Scarpia in the 1907 shinpa
daughter of the tyrannical
production of La Tosca. (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum,
Spanish oppressor; and
Waseda University)
Kawai as Rysoor’s
treacherous wife Dolorès, whose affair with her husband’s best friend leads her to betray the
Flemish rebels to the Spaniards. Both Sadayakko and Kawai played juicy female roles with ample
Performing Gender in Chinese Theatre

room for emotional and melodramatic display.

Playing these roles apparently added European melodramatic touches to Kawai’s portrayal
of Western women, who were portrayed with a somewhat straighter posture and a formulaic
set of melodramatic gestures and facial expressions. This can be seen if we compare two stage
shots of Sadayakko and Kawai as Tosca. In the picture of Kawai as Tosca stabbing the police
chief Scarpia (fig. 3), his posture is much more upright than his kabuki-based posture of the ideal
Japanese woman, and his foreboding facial expression is reminiscent of European melodramatic

8. According to the posters of the two productions.

39

Figure 4. Kawakami Sadayakko as Tosca in a 1913 production
at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo. (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi
Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University)
acting. The facial expression is similar to
that of Sadayakko playing the same role in
a much more realistic production in 1913
(fig. 4). Although it was impossible for
Sadayakko to have had any specific impact
on Kawai in his portrayal of Tosca, it
is entirely probable that their earlier
experiences together provided Kawai,
who had never been to the West, with a
glimpse of European melodramatic acting,
which he then adopted to modify his
kabuki-based conventions.
Although the Chinese students saw
Sadayakko onstage, what they found
imitable in shinpa was its onnagata
performance of a fusion of Eastern and
Western womanhood, a practice they
must have found completely natural given
the fact that it was also the norm in both
jingju and kabuki. Even in shingeki (new
drama), a more literary and foreignizing
form of Western-style Japanese theatre
that was just beginning to emerge in
1906,9 men still played most female roles
for the first few years due to a limited
talent pool of women actors. For example,
in the productions of The Merchant of
Venice (1906) and Hamlet (1907) mounted
by Bungei Kyõkai (the Literary Society),
one of the two founding shingeki groups,
men played Gertrude and Portia while
an actress portrayed Ophelia (Powell
1998:44).

Spring Willow’s Emulation of Shinpa Onnagata

Three art students studying oil painting at Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkou (the Tokyo Fine Arts School)—
Li Shutong, Zeng Xiaogu, and Huang Er’nan—founded the Spring Willow Society in 1906. As
students of Western painting, Li, Zeng, and Huang were particularly keen observers of Western
costume and movement, and found evidence of it in the paintings they studied (Ouyang [1939]
1990:12–13). At the same time, many of the Spring Willow members were avid jingju fans
capable of singing both male and female roles (see Huang 2001:50–53; Ouyang [1939] 1990:8).
Yet, neither the still images of oil paintings, nor the highly sophisticated code of female imper-
sonation in jingju can adequately explain how the realistically inclined Spring Willow members
portrayed women. From their first performance, which was Act Three of Alexandre Dumas fils’s
La Dame aux Camélias, Spring Willow sought direct inspiration from shinpa by asking shinpa
star Fujisawa Asajirõ to be their director (Lin [1944] 1991:41–42).
The Spring Willow’s script of La Dame aux Camélias was based on both a popular Chinese
rendering of Dumas fils’s novel and a Japanese translation of the play by Osada Shutõ, which was
Siyuan Liu

9. Shingeki was the modern Japanese theatre genre that followed Western realistic dramatic and theatrical principles
in staging both foreign and native plays. It started in the first decade of the twentieth century.

40
inspired by Kawakami’s viewing of Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Marguerite Gauthier in 1893
(Downer 2003:64). When Kawakami and Sadayakko made their second European tour in 1901,
they performed the play in Paris (Salz 1993:63). In 1903, Nakamura Nakakichi, an actress
who had been part of this tour, staged the play for the first time in Japan at Tokyo’s Masago-za
(Matsumoto 1980:383). Also a member of Kawakami’s 1901 tour, Fujisawa had direct knowledge
of these shinpa productions when the Chinese students asked him to be their director in January
1907. Therefore, Fujisawa probably used both Western melodramatic and shinpa onnagata
techniques to help Li perform Margurite Gauthier. The success of this performance paved the
way for Fujisawa’s next and more eminent project with Spring Willow: directing their first full-
length production—Heinu yutian lu—in June of the same year, which he rehearsed “twice a week
for over twenty times” (Ihara 1907:113). It was not surprising that some of the actors were
praised by Japanese critics for their emulation of shinpa stars. Ihara Seiseien, a famous theatre
critic who wrote extensively on both kabuki and shinpa, found Zeng’s sobbing and crying as
Eliza quite natural, resembling the style of Kimura Misao (1907:111), a shinpa onnagata known
for his portrayal of mild-mannered women (Ishin 1936:362).
Besides emulating individual actors, beginning with their next major production, La Tosca,
in early 1909, Spring Willow adopted the practice of restaging popular shinpa productions by
its top stars, especially Kawai and his chief rival onnagata Kitamura Rokurõ, who were imitated
by Spring Willow actors Ouyang Yuqian and Ma Jiangshi, respectively. Their emulation of these
top shinpa onnagata in the restaged productions would make Ouyang and Ma the best-known
female impersonators—called nandan in Chinese —in wenmingxi, setting the standard for
performing Eastern and Western femininity in Shanghai in the 1910s.
By 1909 Ouyang had replaced Li, who had quit the stage, as Spring Willow’s top nandan.
As Ouyang recalls in his 1939 memoir, by then he and Lu Jingruo, who became Spring Willow’s
de facto leader in both Tokyo and Shanghai,10 had set their sights on shinpa’s top romantic pair,
Kawai and Ii Yõhõ:
Jingruo’s acting somewhat emulated Ii Yõhõ. Since I had seen quite a number of Kawai
Takeo’s plays, I was greatly influenced by Kawai Takeo. Kawai was quite tall and strong;
however, his movement and expression were exquisite. According to the Japanese, there
was nothing in Kawai’s movement that showed the slightest difference from a woman.
Moreover, even some women could not attain his dignity and smoothness. I enjoyed his
plays the most. His roles were mostly active and vibrant women, with occasional older
women. Since I liked the type of characters he played, I paid special attention to him.
([1939] 1990:20)11
Here, Ouyang views Kawai’s success through the kabuki prism. As one of the most dedi-
cated actors of wenmingxi, Ouyang records how much he and Lu rehearsed their lines, applied
makeup “three or four times a day,” and practiced laughing, crying, and movement in the mode
of Kawai and Ii, with Lu even going so far as shaving his eyebrows in the tradition of kabuki
(20).
Consequently, it was Kawai’s combination of kabuki and melodramatic conventions that
Performing Gender in Chinese Theatre

Ouyang set out to emulate in La Tosca. This is clearly revealed in two strikingly similar stage
shots of the same scene in La Tosca, one with Kawai as Tosca and Ii as her lover Cavaradossi,

10. Lu Jingruo was the most dedicated member of the Spring Willow Society and had studied both shinpa and
shingeki. An aesthetics and psychology major at Tokyo Imperial University, Lu studied at Fujisawa’s Tokyo Haiyū
Yōseijo (Tokyo Actor’s School) and appeared as a supernumerary in a shinpa production that featured some of the
genre’s brightest stars (Nakamura 2004:18). He later joined the Literary Society, where he played minor roles in its
1911 productions of A Doll’s House, Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet (see Nakamura 2004:24–26; Ouyang [1958]
1985:34).
11. All translations unless otherwise noted are my own.

41
 and the other with
Ouyang and Lu in the
same roles (figs. 5 and 6).
In this scene, the police
chief Scarpia tortures
Cavaradossi in order to
find out where he has
hidden the revolutionary
refugee Angelotti. As
Cavaradossi faints time
and again under torture,
Tosca eventually relents
and gives up Angelotti’s
hiding place.
These photographs
show exactly the same
Figure 5. The torture scene of the shinpa version of La Tosca in moment at the beginning
1907 with Ii Yōhō (center), Kawai Takeo (right), and Fukasawa of this scene: Cavaradossi is sitting in the
Kōzō (left). (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre middle with Tosca standing by his left
Museum, Waseda University) and Scarpia to his right. The two pictures
reveal a remarkable degree of affinity in
costume, blocking, posture, and expres-
sion. Ouyang, wearing the same kind of
white dress, hairdo, and necklace, was
obviously trying to follow Kawai’s
example, but he was not completely
successful. He holds a handkerchief with
both hands in a three-quarter pose with
his eyes looking at the camera while Kawai
holds onto Cavaradossi’s shoulders with
his/her worried eyes looking at Scarpia.
This was only Ouyang’s fourth time
onstage, so he had just barely started to
imitate shinpa onnagata conventions,
but all this would change as he continued
Figure 6. The torture scene of the Spring Willow’s version of playing both Western and Eastern female
La Tosca in 1909 with Lu Jingruo (center), Ouyang Yuqian roles in Tokyo and Shanghai. In addi-
(right), and Wu Wozun (left). (From Xiaoshuo shibao 1911) tion, he also took an interest in jingju,
which, just as kabuki had done for Kawai,
complemented his stage presence and helped augment his stature as one of the most influential
nandan actors of wenmingxi.
After La Tosca, Spring Willow more or less settled on transporting shinpa productions to
China. Apart from European plays, they also brought some well-known shinpa domestic
melodramas to Shanghai, including Hototogisu/Burugui (The Cuckoo; 1901/1914),12 Chikyõdai/
Ru zimei (Foster Sisters; 1905/1916), Ushio/Meng huitou (The Tide; 1908/1910), and Kumo no
hibiki/Shehui zhong (The Echo of Clouds; 1907/1912). These plays showed shinpa at its maturity
as an art form, and they were popular both in Tokyo and in Shanghai. In these plays, shinpa’s
adaptation of kabuki for performing femininity was obvious.
Siyuan Liu

12. The titles are in Japanese and Chinese respectively (Japanese/Chinese). The dates show their premiere dates in
Japan and Shanghai.

42
 One of these plays in
which Kawai starred and
Ouyang again imitated
was Chikyõdai,13 which tells
the story of two young
women, Kimie and Fusae,
raised as foster sisters.
When Fusae turns out
to be the daughter of a
marquis, Kimie disguises
herself as Fusae, goes to
the marquis’ household,
and succeeds in marrying
his chosen heir, who in
fact loves Fusae. In time,
Kimie’s former lover
returns to demand that
Figure 7. The beach scene in the shinpa Chikyōdai with Ii Yōhō and Kawai Takeo
she honor their vow to
during a 1907 production at Tokyo’s Shintomi-za. (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi
marry. Their fateful
Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University)
meeting takes place at
the beach where Kimie,
in a rage, jumps into the
water and drowns herself,
thus bringing poetic
justice to the saga.
In the photographs of
Kawai and Ouyang
playing Kimie during the
beach scene (figs. 7 and 8),
it again appears that
Ouyang followed Kawai’s
model, playing this time a
coquettish and cunning
woman. Here, Kawai has
his back turned away from
his/her pursuer yet is
evidently keenly aware
of the latter. The lowered
head and foot slipping out
Figure 8. The beach scene in the wenmingxi Chikyōdai with Wang Youyou and
of the zori sandal further
Ouyang Yuqian during a 1916 production at Shanghai’s Xiaowutai Theatre.
suggest an imprudent
(From Youxi zazhi 1915)
woman. While Ouyang
Performing Gender in Chinese Theatre

saw this production in

Tokyo, it would have been impossible for him to follow Kawai’s every move a decade later in
Shanghai, but by 1916, he was much more proficient at performing Japanese womanhood. He
followed what is known in kabuki and shinpa as kata, which, in the words of James R. Brandon,
means the “form, pattern, or model” of the “actor’s vocal and movement techniques” and
“production elements such as costuming, makeup, and scenic effects” (1978:65). Ouyang’s tilted

13. The play was adapted from a Meiji novel of the same title by Kikuchi Yūhō that was, in turn, based on a Victorian
dime-store novel entitled Dora Thorne by Bertha B. Clay, penname for Charlotte Mary Brame (Iizuka 1998:94).

43
 head, turned upper torso,
and posture with one knee
behind the other reveal
his mastery of shinpa’s
“patterned acting” of
femininity.
Other members of
the Spring Willow Society
also modeled their acting
on shinpa onnagata. The
most notable example is
Ma Jiangshi’s emulation
of Kitamura Rokurõ,
Kawai’s rival for the title
of top shinpa onnagata.
Excelling in performing
suffering and tragic
Figure 9. The final act of the 1907 shinpa production of Kumo no hibiki with
women, Kitamura was
Takada Minoru (middle), Kitamura Rokurō (right), and Fujisawa Asajirō (left).
best known for his
(Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University)
portrayal of Namiko,
the misunderstood and
tuberculosis-infected heroine of Hototogisu, the most famous shinpa domestic melodrama.
Kitamura and shinpa’s tough man, Takada Minoru, also created some of the most memorable
roles of contemporary low-class Japanese, such as the peasant sister and brother pairs in
Ushio and Kumo no hibiki (fig. 9), two plays on social issues written especially for shinpa by
the journalist and playwright Satõ Kõroku. In contrast to Kawai and Ii Yõhõ, who were both
praised for elevating shinpa acting by using kabuki conventions, Kitamura and Takada were
known for their more naturalistic styles, which emphasized breathing techniques and real-life
observation.
Lu and Ma adapted these three plays for the Chinese audiences in Shanghai, where the
suffering heroines and Kitamura’s stylization of them was enacted by Ma. As one of the original
members of Spring Willow Society, Ma adapted Hototogisu, with “its structure and certain skills
following the style of Kitamura Rokurõ” (Ouyang [1958] 1985:37). With a small build and a
haunting voice just like Kitamura ([1939] 1990:22), Ma also followed the latter’s example by
living a womanly life away from the public (Ishin 1936:357; Ouyang [1939] 1990:38). Onstage,
he was committed to emotional realism and even fainted once in a romantic scene (Ouyang
[1939] 1990:47). As a result, Ma was widely hailed as wenmingxi’s best performer of tragic
women.

Spring Willow as Wenmingxi’s Model of Gender Performance

As a result of their pioneering efforts, Ouyang and Ma were considered by the Chinese to be
the best performers of Western and Eastern womanhood. But more importantly, it was their
work in Chunliu Juchang (the Spring Willow Theatre)—which was formed in Shanghai in 1913
by former members of the Spring Willow Society—that set the wenmingxi standard of gender
performance. This can be seen from two photographs of wenmingxi all-male companies other
than the Spring Willow Theatre. The first one (fig. 10) from Hototogisu is of the same act as
was depicted in the shinpa production starring Kitamura, Ii, and Fujisawa (fig. 11). The second
photograph (fig. 12) is from a play called Jiating enyuan ji (Love and Hate in a Family; 1912) by
Lu Jingruo, who wrote the play in very much the same mode as shinpa domestic melodrama.
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44
 Although both Chinese
productions were Sinicized,
they clearly followed shinpa
conventions, including its
gender performance,
imported and popularized by
the Spring Willow Theatre.14
In the two pictures (figs. 10
and 11) depicting the first act
of Hototogisu from shinpa and
wenmingxi productions, there
are general similarities in set,
properties, and blocking,
while in the following two
stage shots (figs. 12 and 13),
the feminine postures are also
strikingly similar, from the
tilted head, the use of the Figure 10. The first act of Hototogisu in a wenmingxi production, with (from
handkerchief as a symbol of left) Qingxing, Zhou Jianyun, and Yifeng. Notice the difference in the character
femininity and its application at right as compared to figure 11. (From Jubu congkan, ed. Zhou Jianyun
to the mouth, and the slight [1918] 1922:104)

Performing Gender in Chinese Theatre

Figure 11. The first act of Hototogisu in a 1908 shinpa production at the Hongo-za theatre, with (from
left) Kitamura Rokurō, Ii Yōhō, and Fujisawa Asajirō. (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre
Museum, Waseda University)

14. Although the Spring Willow Theatre was not the most commercially successful company in wenmingxi, it was
universally acknowledged among wenmingxi practitioners as possessing the highest aesthetic standard and as the
ideal for other actors.

45
 angle of the body, to the positioning of
the feet.
The citational nature of these gestures
is even more obvious when we contrast
them with the generally upright postures
of the emerging actresses who did not
follow the conventions of female imper-
sonators, as can be seen in the following
stage shot by two actresses (fig. 14),
Ye Wenying and Xie Tongying, from a
mid-1910s production of Xielei bei (The
Monument of Blood and Tears).
In fact, wenmingxi’s debate over the
appropriateness of having actresses
assuming female roles essentially focused
on the issue of citationality, with its
supporters arguing that the practice was
more natural than female impersonation
and its opponents resorting to moralistic
arguments that held that mixed-gender
casting resulted in obscenity (Ma 1914:7).
This is the argument made by Zhou
Jianyun, a well-known wenmingxi actor
and critic:
New drama is realistic, pursuing
verisimilitude in every way. It is not
Figure 12. An all-male cast production of Jiating enyuan ji. like old drama, which is restricted
(From Youxi zashi 1915) by rhyming and conventions. While
old theatre refrains from frankness
in its portrayal of romantic or erotic
scenes, [in new drama] this is usually the most disgusting moment when the two parties
flirt and act as if it were for real, revealing all forms of sickening behavior in front of the
audience. ([1918] 1922:749)

As Elizabeth Howe shows in the case of the first English actresses in the 17th century, the
novelty of actresses’ bodies onstage was exploited and often fueled societal bias against the
emerging actresses (1992:37–65). Contemporary and subsequent accounts of the first mixed-
gender wenmingxi company, the Minxing She (Prosperity Society), often cited commercial
opportunism as its true motive (Wu [1918] 1922:339–40; Zhou [1918] 1922:749; Xu 1957:60;
Ouyang [1939] 1990:57). While this may be true, the aversion to naturalistic portrayal of
romantic scenes underscores a general uneasiness among wenmingxi actors and critics about
the shifting ground under wenmingxi’s gender performance, revealing it to be what Judith
Butler calls “a constituted social temporality”:
If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a
seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a “ground” will be displaced and
revealed as a stylized configuration, indeed, a gendered corporealization of time. ([1990]
1999:179)

Indeed, if the trajectory of shinpa’s gender performance is any indication, it was right around
this time, in 1914, that the battle of the sexes in modern Japanese theatre took a decided turn as
Siyuan Liu

the two divas of shinpa and shingeki, Kawakami Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako, performed in

46
dueling productions of Oscar Wilde’s
Salomé. According to Ayako Kano:15
Salomé marks a moment in Japanese
history when the alignment between
gender, sex, sexuality, and performance
thus registered a recognizable shift:
from gender defined as theatrical
achievement, to gender defined as
grounded in the visible body and as
basis for theatrical expression. There
is a shift from gender as the endpoint
of acting to gender as the beginning
of acting. The title role of Salomé
epitomized the new definition of
womanhood as rooted in the physical
body and of woman’s body as the basis
for acting. (2001:219)

Specifically, it was the gradual revela-

tion of the female body in the “Dance of
the Seven Veils” that made it “inconceiv-
able for a male performer of female roles”
(220). At a time when well-known new
dramatists like Zhou found love scenes
between actors and actresses repulsive,
it is hard to imagine a Chinese Salomé
moment in wenmingxi, a form that was
deeply rooted in the transitive era of the
1910s. Only a few years after the fall of
the Qing dynasty, the mid 1910s was
just at the beginning of the New Culture
Movement (1915–1924), during which
“the sexual order maintained by Confu-
cianism” was challenged by a powerful
wave of “open talk of sex” based on the Figure 13. A scene from Hototogisu with Kitamura Rokurō (left)
modern European dualistic concept of and Ii Yōhō (right). (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre
human sexuality, which “rapidly became Museum, Waseda University)
a sign of liberation from the ‘shackles
of tradition’ among modernizing elites”
(Dikötter 1995:1).
In this sense, Chou Huiling is correct to assert that fierce attack of actresses from the nandan
actors “reveals the male artists’ deep fear of competition from women actors” (1997:149). At the
Performing Gender in Chinese Theatre

same time though, it still had not dawned on the nandan actors that the emergence of actresses
would eventually mean that “gender is no longer a pattern to be cited but becomes an identity to
be expressed” (Kano 2001:73). Ouyang actually did try to learn the “Dance of Seven Veils” from

15. Matsui Sumako was one of the best-known actresses in early shingeki whose roles included Ophelia in the 1911
Literary Society production of Hamlet. Her romantic relationship with the Literary Society’s most prominent
director, Shimamura Hōgetsu, effectively split the Society when she was expelled in 1913 and the couple created
their own company, Geijutsu-za (Art Theatre).

47
 a Russian woman with
the hope of performing
Salomé himself, and it is
possible that Ouyang was
prompted by the news of
Sadayakko’s and Matsui’s
productions, yet he had
to give up the ambition
in the end. His stated
reason was that he could
not afford the lessons,
although it is hard to
imagine him actually
taking them, even with
funding (Ouyang [1939]
1990:73). In fact, his stage
life soon took a turn in
another direction, toward
Figure 14. Wenmingxi actresses Ye Wenying and Xie Tongying in The Monument the completely conven-
of Blood and Tears. (From Jubu congkan, ed. Zhou Jianyun [1918] 1922:105) tionalized world of jingju.
For a decade that began
in the late 1910s, he was a professional jingju actor in female roles. During this time his fame
briefly rivaled that of Mei Lanfang, as underscored by the saying “Mei of the north and
Ou[yang] of the south” (bei Mei nan Ou).16 Therefore, it is possible to see his move to jingju
as a result of the decline of female impersonation in wenmingxi.

Conclusion
As Ouyang’s case indicates, there was much fluidity between wenmingxi and jingju, which
further underscores the fact that even though wenmingxi was inspired by modern Western
theatre, its concept of gender performance, just like that of shinpa, also had a great affinity with
jingju and kabuki, where gender performance was based on the premodern notion of male and
female as complimentary parts of a whole instead of directly opposite of each other. As signified
by the wakashu root of kabuki, the modern straight/gay dichotomy was nonexistent. This
attitude changed in the 1920s after the New Culture Movement, when the modern “scientific”
discourse that emphasized the incompatibility of biological sexes paved the way for the eventual
elimination of cross-gender casting in huaju in the 1920s.
Consequently, viewing wenmingxi’s gender performance as either drag or radical transgres-
sion not only ignores the role of shinpa onnagata, but also fails to identify the historicity of
gender construction in modern China as, in Butler’s words, “materialization that stabilizes over
time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (1993:9). In a sense,
the 1910s in China was just at the beginning of this process of materialization of China’s
Western-oriented modern sexuality. On this account, Kawakami and Sadayakko’s brand of
“straight theatre”—seigeki—set the tone for what was to come:
The fluidity that characterized premodern kabuki’s “intertextuality”—understood as the
regime of possible channels between genders and sexualities—is thus framed onto the

16. In the late 1910s, both Mei Lanfang and Ouyang Yuqian created a group of reformed jingju plays based on the
Chinese classical novel Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber). Since Mei was based in Beijing and Ouyang
Siyuan Liu

was based in Shanghai, their performance of the same characters created a sense of competition and, therefore,
equal stature, thus the saying “bei Mei nan Ou.”

48
 bodies of males and females, closing off the kinds of polymorphous desires that were
previously possible. (Kano 2001:83)

As I have shown, gender identity in shinpa and wenmingxi was much more complicated
than allowed by a dualistic East/West, tradition/modernity framework. The examination of
the specific connection between gender performance in shinpa and wenmingxi is crucial to
our understanding of gender performance in the beginning of modern theatre in China.
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